Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday August 19, 2013 @09:58AM
from the not-gonna-do-it dept.

Sockatume writes "Marcus 'Notch' Persson of Minecraft fame has indefinitely postponed his planned space game, 0x10c. Taking time to chat during a streamed TF2 game, Notch explained that he didn't have the energy to keep up with the community's interest; fans had gone so far as to transcribe the source code from his development livestream. The game's development had been stalled since April this year, when Notch explained that it simply wasn't fun to play, but other staff at Mojang can resume the project if they wish. He intends to continue his pre-Minecraft habits and 'make small games and talk to other game developers about them'."

The problem is, that Minecraft can feel more like work, than a game. Sure you can spend a lot of time playing...but it's because of the bad design decisions. Think about the chunks... if you travel a bit, you can come back to find your farm at the state you left it in because Notch didn't think of keeping track of time and updating crops growing when you return to the chunk.

That's one of the reasons the multiplayer is popular, because the game is so time consuming that more people helps with the "work".

but the popularity suggests those are not game breakers and don't ruin the fun for most of those who play it.

I think the real question is "how are people actually playing the game" I'm seeing signs that the majority of non-hardcore players are simply using creative or playing on peaceful.

Sheer space of things you could do is the fun part, not the things you can't.

True, but how do you find out what you "can" do? You use the wiki.

Oh, and I like reading the wiki, just to find out what others found and thought up. Should Mojang include a five page tutorial on basic redstone logic and then a dozen pages more on advanced ways to apply it?

When you play Civilization, what does the game have built into it? The Civilopedia! Even Civilization Revolution has it! Tells you everything you need to know to play the game.

Because some nerds are using "oh minecraft is so popular and it's because it's so nerdy and has redstone circuitry etc etc"...when it's not.

You could condense knowledge of what's needed to get to Minecraft's endgame in several pages

Really? Considering what people recommend one does/has BEFORE doing that...I think not. Potions of this, potions of that High level enchanted stuff, not counting you have to find an end portal and have eyes of ender to activate it.

Again, that's wrong... how?

Because no other game is that dependent on external sources of information. Even Nethack, which is hardcore-nerdy and very inaccessible to

There's plenty of open source software that is far more "finished" than Minecraft, though the flaws of Minecraft and it's development do remind me of open-source software. You know how it is, some visionary starts a project and quits before it's done because starting something new is more "fun" than actually quashing bugs, and finishing and polishing a project.

I have. But the actual point I was trying to make is that nobody pays me for a half finished product. And the current trend to sell games that are in perpetual alpha, or if we're being generous, beta stage for years with no "final" even on the horizon is somehow worrying. In the past we did get a few games that worked out in the long run. But the amount of vaporware that gets sold with little to no progress for months is going to kill that "kickstart" movement. Right now, people eagerly buy into the chance

It's been labeled 1.0 and even released on disc for a closed platform. This makes it "finished" by at least some objective standards. Was Quake III Arena for Mac and Windows not finished while it was still getting patches? Are Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games "not finished" while they're still getting DLC? Was Doki Doki Panic for Famicom Disk System "not finished" because Nintendo revised it into Super Mario Bros. 2: Mario Madness for NES, Super Mario All-Stars for Super NES, and Super Mario Advance for Gam

If there's one thing I learned from the film Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, it's "delegate, delegate, delegate." If you know you're not the right kind of person to finish a project, then bring in someone else who is. Baseball likewise has a concept of a closing pitcher [wikipedia.org] who specializes in finishing games.

You appear to be judging a book by it's cover. Or more appropriately, rejecting wisdom because it comes from an 80's teen movie. Or 90's.

There are probably some valuable lessons to be learned from anything. I'm going to now watch porn. To prove my thesis that there are important lessons everywhere. I'll report back when I get some results.

Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead is a surprising good "teen movie" - a coming of age flick about actually needing to work and take responsibility in adult life. Not a message we get enough of these days, I don't think.

Yes. The average game today is not finished at release. At least it's not in a state that deserves the name "finished". Considering the amount of alcohole imbibed by some Finns I know, some of the games sure seem very Finnished, (joke works with polish, too, btw) but not finished by any stretch.

No, finished is finished. As in a game that makes good on things promised. ESPECIALLY when talking about a game such as minecraft, which was sold as a beta, on the promise of more things coming later. Half the shit in the game he got from community mods, such as grass, and half the shit promised isnt even in the game at all, such as lanterns. If they had a standard business model i wouldnt even care, as what you see is what you get. But since they presold the game promising new features and updates, alot wh

They have had a steady stream of new features and updates the entire time I have been playing, which is close to 4 years now. Any particular feature might not make it in, but that is hardly breaking their promise for adding new stuff.

Minecraft has been and is under continual development. 'Release' has a much more tenuous meaning here, there was already a large and well established community for the game well before it was officially 'released'.

Minecraft is kind of like a MMO. Each patch brings out some new feature (Horses! Upside down stairs! Hoppers!), except that they never ask you for any more money. It's best played with a group of people too.

I consider that a serious design flaw. It's no wonder multiplayer is popular because in single-player there's too much stuff for one player to do and it can become overwhelming, especially with chunks not updating (farms) when you're far enough away from them.

Most games in the market are not feature completed as designed. In the design process the vast majority of games suffer cuts. And most never become feature complete. Minecraft being under development is a good thing, because unlike other games that cut features and never implement them, Minecraft will keep having lacking and newly thought features implemented for as long as it is maintained.

Yes, but that means Mojang has to devote resources to Minecraft....forever. Think about it, do you think Squaresoft or Bethesda have staff devoted to working on the Final Fantasy VI or Oblivion codebase...no. That means that those companies can put their manpower on NEW projects...oh say for example a space game with a built in programmable CPU only hardcore nerds will use.

But Mojang can't do that, which is bad because they're "Indie" and simply don't have enough resources or people to spare.

The feature complete requirement for beta only really applies to waterfall release models. For products that are on a constant iterative release schedule, once the core product is ready, it is a bit of a useless term. Minecraft alpha was not in 'alpha' in the traditional software development sense.

If we consider Notch as a game designer, he doesn't have to finish the implementation to have done he job well. How was Minecraft harmed by his going hands off while it was in alpha? Do we really expect his next project to be as successful as the Minecraft phenomenon?

No, we should slap Nintendo silly for ever letting Shiggy near a controller design team. Blame him for that absolute piece of crap that is the N64 controller.

Nintendo also needs to have someone, say an Anglophone, stand around Shiggy and say "No." to his stupider design ideas since apparently the Japanese game development community has no one to tell them NO.

Navi? NO

Tingle NO.

Not providing any sort of in-game hints to specific features (the white block trick in SMB3). NO.

It's cool that he is handing it off to the community, but other than that -- there isn't much of a story here. Developers -- especially game developers -- prototype ideas and work on them for months all the time. Ultimately, they often result in nothing. Things don't work. Technology isn't there yet. The userbase shows no interest. Or, probably most often, the developer just loses their passion for that project/prototype and moves on to something else. Notch could go through twenty of these before he finally lands on something that he feels passionate about for the long-haul.

Given that he's made his millions doing Minecraft - it's quite possible for him to do whatever the hell he wants on his own schedule and not give a flying pig's bum about getting anything finished....more time to work on that minecraft sculpture of a giant (CENSORED)

Except that when your own company develops video games, gaming is more like researching a competitor's product or service.

Nah, in Notches case it's just a lack of attention span. Don't get me wrong, he's an okay guy, but just follow his twitter account for a month or two. He hops from idea to idea, would rather be working on something else once he starts, drops everything for a 7-day FPS competition, etc. The old joke used to be that notch codes a few lines in between his vacations.

I think his attention span problem comes from a lack of incentive to work on something from start to finish. With minecraft his incentive was that it was making him a millionaire, but then at some point (when it went from "ludicrously popular" to "proposterously popular") he delegated that to someone else.

Having said that, he got lucky and he seems a guy with a right mindset at times. So he failed this time, as do many. They just don't have a billion followers wolfing down every word they utter.

Yes, but why is that? I mean, there are people who are famous for one reason or another, maybe they did something right ONCE, maybe they got lucky, maybe they just happened to be hyped to the top by someone who makes money off them, and suddenly everyone cares about their opinion about... well, EVERYTHING.

Yes, he made a game, one that a lot of people enjoy, as do I (ok, no more, but I have spent my time playing it). It has its charm. But that doesn't mean that his opinion on gaming matters any more than an

I have no race in this horse (never played Minecraft or Roblox), but why do you assume it was luck that let Minecraft take the lead over Roblox, as opposed to it being better?

And I'm not looking for some subjective response like "Roblox has way better XYZ!" I'm wondering why people flocked to Minecraft. There must be a reason. If the answer is "luck" that probably just means Minecraft is better in ways that are hard to quantify.

Well, it was a bit of both. Minecraft was one of a whole class of games, but a combination of how it was made, community, and luck of getting noticed by some high profile people are what did it. Luck was not the only factor, but it was a big one.

Notch loves doing demos and one-offs. He's also really good at it, which is why you'll see him at every "Code something over the weekend for Charity!" type events. He's got millions of euros now that says he can do that if he wants.

I think his attention span problem comes from a lack of incentive to work on something from start to finish.

I think part of that goes with being a European developer that seems to be common among them, the lack of ability or desire to do the "final finishing and polishing". Of course it just might be the "indie mindset". If you're non-indie you've got "somebody" who can say NO or give an order. "By god, you put necessary game information IN THE GAME, stop adding new features and do the final polish or heads will roll."

The problem with Notch is he is an ideasguy with grand scopes for things but has knowledge of coding left in the 80s and 90s.

He's self taught I've read. Probably one of those ex euro-pirate guys whose brain is stuck in the Amiga or ST.days who goes off and starts some indie phone game company once he realizes he wants to make money.

He heavily promotes a new project, even live streams his coding of it, then quits because people are paying too much attention to it. WTF. If you don't want anyone paying any attention to your projects, don't live stream the coding of it. Just don't talk about it, and release it when its done.

I wonder if Notch doesn't take on big projects anymore has more to do with him affording not to deal with the stress and patience it takes to deliver a big project. I think it is the same problem that many in the post-success stage have. Look at some of the greatest bands in recent history. You don't see Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Eagles etc creating at the same level they used to despite being the same creative people. Another example are actors like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Harrison Ford. I just

I think it's just an excuse for a much more simple fact: there was no game behind this. All he had was an idea (just like Minecraft, really) which wasn't much of a game. Let's have space ships and programming and let's make it like Minecraft and Elite and whatever! Then, unlike Minecraft, he didn't manage to figure out how to make it into a game. It just ended up being a bunch of disparate systems which didn't work well together or just weren't fun to use.

i don't doubt that he was feeling a lot of pressure to succede wildly again. But I do agree with you that it just didn't sound like much of a game. In fact I would have liked the idea of it a lot more as a straight up expansion or addon for Minecraft. Simply enabling the building of space ships. You could keep the computer programming and maybe add robots and such that you can build and program to do your bidding, whether that is flying your ship, gathering materials, automating mining and construction on l

Though with any luck someone will pick up the idea and find a way to make it work. One thing that games like EvE have always really lacked was a good way to actually _build_ thing as opposed to just placing other people's art in space.

Software is on the list of stuff you don't want to watch being made along with sausages and laws. Seriously, it can be boring, exhausting, and tedious, and having hordes of outsiders playing armchair project manager only interrupts the process. It's a different story if you're working on a free software community project in an open forum, but even that needs an assigned project manager to field the input from people not in the inner circle.

I don't really feel sorry for him, but I do understand him. Few of us will ever know what it's like to have success on Notch's scale, but I'm sure plenty of us can relate even in some small way.

Sometimes, usually by accident, you fall into a wildly successful project. And one day you catch yourself really, dreadfully bored of it, yet still fervently working on it. Maybe due to a sense of ownership -- not wanting others to screw it up --, or maybe just because a ton of people expect you to and it gives you a

I don't think you understood my point. I don't know the best way to do anything, least of all think or develop games. But Notch was asking for the very things he was complaining about. Its like ordering vodka at a bar and then complaining to the waiter that he served you alcohol. What the hell did he expect?

Are you seriously trying to victimize Notch? What about all the people that made basically the same game before he did, yet no one knows who the fuck they are. Do you know who made Infiniminer? Fortresscraft? Exactly.

Shores of Hazeron is a first-person 4X-style game featuring fully-customizable spacecraft, city building and management, exploration, trade, combat, and more. It's playable right now, though it's under heavy development.
http://hazeron.com/ [hazeron.com]

... and then there's Star Citizen, of course; a cross between Freelancer and Wing Commander - but you'll need to wait a while.
http://robertsspaceindustries.com/ [robertsspa...stries.com]

There's also Rawbots, a robot building game where you can design your own robot, program it, and battle against other robots in arenas that you can design yourself. Multiplayer isn't done yet, but they're working on it. The robot building/programming and level editing features already work and are quite fun.

It's also important to remember that of all of the projects announced, maybe 10% of them will make it to release. So working on something that someone else has announced interest in doesn't mean much. There are a bajillion minecraft clones out there that claim they will do it better, but I've yet to see one that works as well as the original. Often times they'll have a couple of features the developer really wanted, like realistic water physics, but utterly fall down in many other ways (no mobs, horrendo

It will be interesting to see if anything happens with Trillek. At the moment it is a whole lot of talk and bruised egos with not much code, but I'm hoping that changes. They are still arguing about what compilers are going to be used, and almost universally they are moving away from Java.

As a fan community which attracted a whole bunch of programmers, it isn't surprising that they are picking up their tools and making the game they wanted to play in the first place. I guess that will be a sort of legacy

The premise of the game was that someone set the "sleep time" on his cold sleep device but got the byte order wrong and was sent so far forward in time that the universe is almost completely through its lifecycle and is deep into the heat death. Of course that was preliminary, he never developed the storyline much.

Most of the focus seemed to be on the in-game computer thing, which was neat but Notch never seemed to have a very good idea what he wanted to do with the rest of the game. I think he lost in

I doubt it was a lack of ideas on what to do with the game. The problem was that almost everything he did was essentially a re-creation of Minecraft, simply set in space. Trying to get away from Minecraft, voxels, and stuff like the Minecraft work bench just proved to be too hard to get away from, particular when his goal was for a similar kind of open-ended game that players could build stuff in.

Supposedly he worked on a spacecraft interior design tool (different from the block placement tool he worked o

He's made one huge success. Let him live off it. He doesn't/have/ to keep producing games for us. It's great that he was so successful and I wish him the best. Maybe one day he'll return to 0x10c, or think of something new. It's wonderful that he has that sort of leisure. And it's awesome that he hasn't just shoved the code for 01x10c in a (virtual) drawer somewhere; he's letting others on his team keep working on it.

I have never known a creative type who didn't get frustrated with projects when people were getting up in their face about what they were working on. So I guess I don't feel much reason to complain here. Yeah, he sort of caused it, but lots of people make that mistake a few times before getting the hang of it.

Something I see often about developers and most developers know for themselves.

The first 30% to 60% of a project - especially if you are not simply tying frameworks together but creating most things from scratch - are fun. People work overtime without even knowing it. As soon as the tiresome stuff starts, and the mostly painfull/dull last 5% to 10%, motivation drops.

Well, as someone who develops games, it's actually 9001% creating experimental things and prototyping new ideas. Coming up with the core mechanic(s), and proofing the in-game player interface, etc. That's the hard part. I'd say less than one out of ten ideas plan out. Coming up with tangential mechanics and adding a bit of depth that works is the first 30% to 60% of the actual project, and putting the polish on something and seeing through is the rest, but there was a ton of effort you never even see, possibly even entire games that never see the light of day. Even if you do make public the "in-progress" game/ideas most of the them won't be known to the general public leading up to a successful project.

So, what if someone came along and does most of the experimenting and prototyping and comes up with something playable and fun. What if instead of coming up with your own ideas you just take that? What if you add a bit of the tangential stuff to someone else's proven core mechanics and gameplay platform. If you do that you can avoid all that pre-production work. That's what Notch Did. [youtube.com]

So, if you got rich by co-opting someone else's ideas wholesale, and your own new ideas are bland and self admittedly devoid of fun... What would you do? Would you decide to go back to making procedural rip-offs of mario? Maybe hang out with some indie gamedevs since that's where you got your best idea from in the first place? Isn't that what Notch would do if he needed new ideas to execute before lesser funded folks could?

Oh, maybe not. Maybe Notch just needs less pressure, yeah, that's it... Let's ignore the whole "Creative Block" story that came out months ago: [polygon.com]
"It's just some kind of weird creative block that's been going on for too long and [0x10c] is going to be put on ice until we can fix that."

Huh, a weird creative block, that's actually very odd. Odder still that this cancellation is news... You know, most game devs, especially indies, suffer from having so many damn ideas they have no time to try them all out. A common problem is having TOO MANY projects going on at once, and these are just a few folks with zero dollars... The games you get could have been 50 times better in most indie devs' minds, they just had to stop adding stuff at some point -- Or strip stuff out to streamline gameplay. How Strange.

FYI: If you hang out with Notch, keep your ideas to yourself, especially if it's kind of fun. Don't get Zynga'd. [wordpress.com] Don't be Notch's next Infiniminer.

Then it's a question of wether it's a private or semi-private project or something that HAS to be finished.
Sadly, many (unexperienced) developers tend to give their timeframe projections during those first "proof-of-concept" days or weeks, and then become even more frustrated when they realize they can't hold the deadline and everything becomes even more painful.
I think most of us have been there. And since 0x10c was a very "special" idea from the beginning, I am not as surprised as I though I would have been that the project is shelved.
At least he admits that it simply wasn't fun...not an easy thing to do when you speak about your own pet-project.

I don't think people praise notch for being a great game designer, do they? He kinda just kept doing stuff and hit it at the right time with the right game. We hadn't been subjected to the alpha funding model before, and that sale of 'promise' was still new and squeaky, and indie games hadn't quite exploded yet, right time, right place.

All games are copies and iterations on existing ones, EQ -> DAOC -> WOW for example, each added their own twist to the previous and improved upon it. I played infiniminer before getting minecraft and it just lacked something that minecraft has, that flavor and personality of the world.

Anyway I agree strongly with your sentiment but the fact is that the world doesn't reward hard work and knowledge and creativity. I have a friend working on a game with this pretty bad ass hand built 2d engine, he made it back before Unity/UDK existed and all that in c++ / dirextx. It is really kickass honestly, and the game play of several of his games is pretty damn good, a one man creation of a functioning RTS.

Though the art was off, he lost money/time to add the polish layer once the engine and gameplay was good, and the game sold basically nothing. That polish push is where the $'s are at, and always has been. The world always walks on the back of great engineers, and unfortunately I don't see this trend ending any time soon.

The world always walks on the back of great engineers, and unfortunately I don't see this trend ending any time soon.

Why should I praise someone who creates something that is of no value to me or of less value than what someone else made? If you make a device that costs me more time than it saves due to a useless UI how is that of any use to me? You can write the most brilliant code ever but unless that translates to a visible impact or feature for customers what's the advantage?

The answer is: you shouldn't, but another question is: why anyone should care about what you think is of value? Especially people who managed to make something that is of enough use to millions of others for them to voluntarily give their moneys to him...

Dear god no. If Notch went back to writing Minecraft I would probably stop getting updates for it. At least Jeb can actually follow through with implementing new features that are at least moderately interesting and not just adding rare half-heart cooking recipies to the game which do ultimately nothing.

I will give you the new launcher is a steaming pile of pig vomit, but it is merely the first iteration.

It makes no sense that horse armour can't be crafted. I hope they change it. The new launcher is a step in the right direction - upgrades were a killer for bukkit servers since you couldn't play them after a client game (until the server also upgraded). Now at least you have a fairly straight-forward way to play on servers running older software. I wish horses could be summoned like on World of Warcraft. In their current form your horse is basically locked to a continent unless you want to build a mas

Making a blaze farm is kind of a PITA. First of all you have to find a damn fortress. Then fight through it to actually find a spawner and then deactivate it, build your trap around it, build some transport to get back and forth, make that transport immune to randomly spawning zombie pigmen, and on and on. It's a PITA, but ultimately worth it I guess for the fast enchanting.

Personally I don't usually bother with blazes for a long time. I build a sky trap based on Monkeyfarm's triangular platform farm. That

Tie your horse to a post (you can carry one) then it won't wander away. Geez, just like a real horse.
I agree on horse armour, but I don't worry too much about it. I'm much more concerned about the inability to craft saddles.
I agree with the horse/boat issue - I don't see a way around that until they code the ability to use larger boats.
Mind you, the ability to travel endlessly without suffering hunger is a huge boon to those of us who play on hardcore mode.
Whining about the inability to craft a s